Der Bauern-Spiegel

I am not making as much progress on things as I need to so far this summer, but I did manage yesterday to finish re-reading Der Bauern-Spiegel, the first novel by my man Jeremias Gotthelf, pictured above.  The title means "The Peasant's Mirror," but I might translate it into English as Reflections on a Peasant's Life, which captures the idea of "mirror" but indicates its (fictional) autobiographical character.

This first novel is in fact the source of the name "Jeremias Gotthelf," because Gotthelf wasn't really Gotthelf at all (it was a pseudonym), but rather Albert Bitzius, a Swiss pastor in the first half of the 19th century.  His book purports to be the life story of a man named, you guessed it, Jeremias Gotthelf.  Readers were persuaded that Gotthelf was the real author, so the name stuck, and Bitzius took it as the pseudonym for his future work, which was extensive.

The story is a powerful social critique of a practice that was common in Switzerland at the time as a way of caring for orphaned or abandoned children.  Called Verdingen, it amounted to a kind of reverse auctioning-off of these children to the lowest bidder.  The local village would hold a gathering once a year in which children in need of caregivers would be distributed among families willing to take them in exchange for a sum that was supposed to cover the costs of their care for the year.  As you can quickly imagine if you think about it, the incentives in such a system are all wrong: the village has an incentive to place a child with whoever will take it for the smallest sum, while the family has an incentive to get as much work out of the child as possible while spending as little as possible on his or her care (and perhaps even making a small profit off the arrangement).  It led to considerable abuse, much of which has only been fully reckoned with in the last couple of decades.  Gotthelf gives a sharp and poignant portrayal of the practice and its effects upon children.